Communication impairment in patients with mild to moderate Parkinson's disease without dementia

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is viewed as a motor disorder, but there are also a variety of communication impairments associated with this disorder. Problems appear even early on in the early stages of illness. Beside of problems in speech intelligibility, both language production and comprehension impairments can negatively influence communication in patients with PD. To compare speech comprehensibility, lexical retrieval and sentence comprehension in PD patients and healthy controls (HC). We enrolled 84 patients with idiopathic PD without dementia (47 men, H&Y stage 2.0 ± 0.5 and total MDS-UPDRS part III 31 ± 11,18) and sex, age and education-matched 82 HC (50 men). Every patient with PD in our study was in the early or starting moderate stage of the disease. Speech Intelligibility Test (T-ZROD), Naming Test, and Sentence Comprehension Test were used to assess individuals in both groups. We found significant differences in speech comprehensibility (intelligibility in context) measured by oral reading semantically non-predictable randomly selected sentences were found. Object, action and total naming performance did not differ across groups, however, there was a significantly larger delay in naming of objects and actions in the PD group. Patients with PD made significantly more errors than healthy controls in comprehension of reversible sentences. There are multiple communication impairment associated with PD even in mild and moderate stage. Problems can be present at sentence comprehension, as well in lexical retrieval of words in speech production, and difficulties can appear also at speech comprehensibility in everyday communication.